Living Stories will have to overcome dead resistance

Living stories should introduce temporal duration into what has been a staccato news form. Sample.

Coursey: Living Stories improves the newspapers ability to deliver news-by-topic, which has proven difficult for newspapers to master.

Indeed. Let's ask why this has proven "difficult." Why have newspapers refused to clump related news in ways that give temporal duration and multiple perspectives?

One reason might be that this would actually require them to be more truthful - the stories would more evidently hold up or fall apart as news broke and developed.

Another might be that if news is thought of as something more than a pellet of a slice of time, it would cease enjoying pure commodity status. News orgs thrive on the idea that a story dies fast, so that they can sell another story. Banks of data that store and enrich themselves over periods would cease to have that rapidfire obsolescence.

It's hard to pretend you have a new product each day when, in fact, you are offering additional layers to an existing entity. An entity that would pretend to remember public understanding of events.

If nothing else, this is another way that Google, by virtue of its power to ferret, is transforming the way news orgs have to conceive of their own bidzness.